1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to frozen food which can be easily handled after thawing and a process for producing the same, particularly suitably applicable to sticky and soft foods such as cream puff doughs and French cruller doughs.
2. Description of the Prior Art
There have been marketed a number of frozen foods to be fried, for example, doughnuts and croquettes, and those to be baked, for example, bread, Danish pastries and pies.
Doughs containing a large amount of moisture, for example, cream puff doughs and French cruller doughs, are extremely soft per se and sticky, so that they are usually heated in an oven or a fryer immediately after the preparation. For example, a French cruller dough, which is highly sticky, is directly drawn onto a fryer in general. In order to thermally treat such doughs after freezing and thawing, therefore, it is necessary to employ various means differing from common procedures.
As a prior art relating to the freezing of sticky and soft food such as the above-mentioned cream puff doughs and French cruller doughs, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 130034/1991 disclosed a method for producing a frozen cream puff dough whereby cream puff cases of a uniform shape and a uniform volume can be easily produced by simply thawing and baking. However this method relates to a cream puff dough with a high freeze resistance and the frozen cream puff dough obtained thereby is thawed by putting it on an oven plate in a line and then baked in the oven as such. Therefore it is not necessary that the thawed cream puff dough have good handleability. Thus the abovementioned frozen cream puff dough shows unsatisfactory handleability after thawing.
Meanwhile, there have been known a number of frozen foods containing a gelling agent. In most of these cases, a gelling agent is added in order to give a jelly-like or pasty final product. Namely, there has not been reported any frozen food containing a gelling agent wherein the handleability of the product is improved by taking advantage of the gelling power of the gelling agent in a stage between thawing and cooking and then the effects of the gelling agent are eliminated in the final product following the cooking.